HN Explorer

Long-reads, "tl;dr" articles

5 points by cubinho ↗ HN
Hey everyone! Just was wondering how everyone feels about long-reads on the web. Do you read them completely? I personally don't haha xD

What if there was a startup which would provide shorter versions of an articles form the web but still keeping their main ideas?

Please check out this link - www.brieflify.com

These guys are doing something similar. It's a community of people who are making so called briefs to an articles and share them. I spent sometime there last couple of days and quickly fullfilled my "reading hunger" with different articles.

I liked it a lot. I am just not sure about the others. Do you think people need that?

Thanks and have a nice day!

12 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] thread
jason_s
Reader's Digest abridged blogs? no thanks....
mirkin
Hi! What if one just don't have enough time to read articles until the end? I'd like to browse briefs and quickly load my brain with only key info if they can manage to make it 5-10x shorter than the original text.
jason_s
If it's your job to stay current, and read hundreds and hundreds of articles to see what is relevant, then yes, I could see a tool for managing "information overload" being useful.

My tool for managing "information overload" is to be more picky about what I choose to read in the first place (HN and Reddit definitely help), and to deal with the fact that I can't read everything. I'd rather read 20 articles in full than read 200 articles in soundbite form. My brain isn't going to retain the information anyway, so I can only hold onto the coherent stuff.

I'm still waiting for a good e-reader with enough resolution and update speed to facilitate rapid scanning. Paper is amazingly fast to read; I can scan through a newspaper much much faster than the equivalent electronic form.

Raphmedia
Take a look at this http://smmry.com/ . I know that some bots on Reddit use similar methods to repost long articles as shortened tl;dr posts.
randomgyatwork
I'm not a fan of long reads on a device, but I don't mind long reads on paper.
stuaxo
Most of them seem to be overly detailed. A couple were great, usually I TLDR.

The newyorker is the worst.

jason_s
The New Yorker is meant to be read and savored, along with a glass of fine wine on a rainy day sitting in a comfortable chair by the fireplace, while jazz plays in the background. Or on a commuter train while trying to forget stresses of the world for a while. It's about "flow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29) while reading.

A "Reader's Digest" abridged version of the New Yorker misses the point.

If your attention span is in a TL;DR mood, don't read the New Yorker.

My favorite articles in past years:

- http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-o... - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

mommylovesme
we're all annoyed when the article you read lacks material: brief.
dragonbonheur
when an article seems too long, I copy the text and then paste it into an online text to speech website. Reading the text while listening to the audio helps me stay focused on the content. If you want to start something create a service that allows webmasters to provide an audio version of their text on their original web page.
enkiv2
If I'm going to read an article, I want it to have some meat on it. I don't bother with anything under forty pages. And, in a well-written article, the information density is very high: that forty pages cannot be summarized in ten pages without cutting out thirty pages worth of information.

Now, I don't have any interest in reading ten pages of information over the course of forty pages. But, people generally don't seem to be doing that. Instead, I see the opposite: three words worth of information expanded out into half a page and posted on HN by someone with something to sell. I'd much prefer something that would help me determine whether or not something was content-free BS before clicking.

krapp
The web is the perfect medium for long-form text, and I think we would lose a lot as a society if people only stuck to the Cliff's Notes' version of everything. If it's well written and interesting then I'll read it.

I believe a synopsis can be useful when it leads the reader to decide whether or not the original is worth their time, but it shouldn't take precedence over the original. On a news aggregator or a forum, the result of people refusing to even read beyond the article title can be damaging to the intellect and to discourse.

I may be a bit of an outlier, though. I read an entire book on a Palm z22 and it didn't bother me at all.

mrbill
Maybe it's just because I'm part of the old-fart grey-hair "get off my lawn" crowd...

Stuff like "haha xD" is fine for online chat, but seems unprofessional and is inappropriate in something like a HN submission, especially if you're trying to get people to look at a project.

And as a counterpoint to brieflify, there's:

http://longform.org/

https://longreads.com/